This is not to be confused with doing things fast just because it seems like a good idea. No, we need to understand sometimes doing things quickly - which is nearly always tactical - is often the opposite of unified and clear execution from a strategic point of view. (Who can’t relate to doing something really fast, only to realize it was the wrong thing to do, so time was lost instead of gained?)

The reason I like this concept will be obvious to anyone who visits this blog: the very idea of strategic speed is dependent on things that overlap with a Verbal Branding platform’s goals. Some key goals are (detailed very nicely in the book) clarity, unity, and agility.

Verbal Branding directly develops the first two; agility is a direct result.

Consider the plight of most Sr. executives: they worry about cultural unity all the time, because business complexity is all around them. To solve their dilemmas, they need to figure out how to simplify their strategy and get it moving through their entire operation so it’s applied correctly.

Here’s how to do it. Develop a Verbal Branding platform (i.e. a differentiated and positioned offer to the market combined with a spoken “application” for it), and apply Strategic Speed to overall operations.

There - problem solved!

But don’t mistake me - those things are part of internal culture, just not the most important part.

The most important part of internal culture is what makes employees of every level confident and collaborative. This can only come from a properly developed brand positioning strategy. Here are some attributes of such a brand result:

• Ultra simple
• Conversational in nature (Walmart’s “Save money. Live better.” is correct; AT&T’s “Rethink Possible” is not. i.e. one is readily understood and one needs translation to be truly understood.)
• Operational in nature (i.e. can be executed, such as Geico’s “15 minutes…15 percent”)
• Confidence inducing (i.e. shows why the company, product, service, etc., is an immediately understandable better option, period!)

It’s OK with me if there’s a foosball game somewhere, trust me. But what I really like seeing is universal knowledge, in complete simplicity, of what the brand is. With this in place, everyone would have explicit knowledge on how to speak about, and take action to fulfill, the brand.

Until you have this, foosball and free Coke won’t add up to much at the end of the day.

Each is valuable; each is also fairly commonplace.

Me? I’d like to know if you can bend the “time” curve, as if you were Einstein? Can you validate, by virtue of your product or service, how you can save a client’s time? And I don’t mean as a talking point; I mean, actually saving the time of a client and therefore speeding up THEIR business processes?

If you can, you might be embarking on a story-line (brand!) that would attract nearly any prospect, and show a significantly better approach to providing service.

Here’s a tip: what’s really at stake is efficiency. You must explicitly show how you’d make a client more efficient. This efficiency can turn into client speed.

So then, if it were me, I’d refine my talking points to reflect CLIENT SPEED OF OPERATIONS as the service result rather than PROVIDER ABILITY toward efficiency. Hardly anyone talks about service impact in this way; certain providers could if they understood what’s truly important to their clients day-to-day operations.

One of the most common themes is Innovation, and marketing that a firm is Innovative. Everyone wants to be seen as innovative in their field. What they don’t know is, if they only tell the audience they are “innovative” and leave it at that, the message will have little or no impact.

First, since everyone is chasing the same messaging, it’s automatically diminished, regardless of how true it might be. (Look…you’re not Apple - no one is Apple except Apple!)

Second, the idea of being innovative is not enough. What is your innovation? Why should the consumer care? Why is it different than your competition’s innovation (since they might be saying the same thing)? Is your innovation real, or are you just saying it because it sounds good, and you actually have none at all?

Here’s an innovation: a pen company that makes pens that literally make a Dr.’s handwriting better!

If this was real, and could be validated as true, this pen company could legitimately claim innovation. But the trick is, claiming innovation without telling the audience what the innovation is doesn’t make branding sense.

Tip: Put the word innovation on a white board. Then write underneath it what the innovation actually is. Now, switch the order - what the innovation is at the top; the word innovation under it.

Market and brand using this as your order of branding logic, not the other way around. Trust me, you’ll get a lot more attention for it.

Own an idea in the mind of the consumer!

And this is correct. But what is less known is this: you also need to own properly constructed ideas in the collective minds of your total employee base.

Most brands under-perform because they ONLY target the purchasing audience, having developed concepts that (might) work in the marketplace but not internally. An example is Fidelity and the “Turn here” campaign. Another is Citizens Bank with “Good banking is good citizenship”.

Whether these compaigns work in the external market is debatable. But these ideas certainly CANNOT work internally, because they don’t inform an explicit mode of sales, operations, culture, and management, and therefore is a huge branding problem.

The very best brands, like Volvo (safe cars) and Walmart (cheaper for stuff I need), in essence are able to tell both the external and internal audiences the same thing.

But here’s the real point: target your INTERNAL audience first. That way you can develop your brand to have execution attributes inherent to it. Volvo = safe, so the internal audience knows how to think, speak to each other, collaborate according to the brand, make decisions, and on and on. Walmart = cheaper stuff, which also informs the internal audience in the same way.

This will be a reversal of directional thinking for many, but it’s non-negotiable if you want a really strong brand.

You’re a CPA firm? Great…what’s someone’s next thought about you? You’re a financial advisor? Who cares! What’s someone’s next thought about you?

If the next thought is something like, nice person, tall, funny, dresses well, dresses badly, seems unorganized, is always late, sort of a jerk…these thoughts represent your brand. If you don’t think this is real, you might be making a big mistake.

Let’s say you’re a financial advisor and you’re the type who’s always late to meetings. It’s very likely being late is your brand, and it reflects on you and your company. I don’t care how well you provide customer service or how knowledgeable you are. For the most part, people expect good service and knowledge. What they don’t expect is for you to be late all the time.

Let’s apply the next thought principal, shall we?

When someone who knows you thinks of referring you, they say to themselves: “Well, Joe is pretty good at what he does (there’s the category part), but he’s always late (there’s the branding part) so I’m not sure if I should introduce him to ___!”

Isn’t this better: “Well, Joe is pretty good at what he does (category) but I notice he always answers his phone; he’s always available (brand)!”

You can’t control people thinking this way about you, you can only pay attention to what brand you embed in their brain and try and manage their image of you.

The book now has a new working title: Verbal Branding and the New Business Simplicity

I’m happier with it (by a lot) because it’s much shorter, quicker to the point, and focuses very explicitly on the value of Simplicity. This feature is the most important one for the true vision of Verbal Branding to be fulfilled.

I’ll keep you posted, but for now, you’ll want to get this book when it’s ready because:

It describes how Simplicity - via the Verbal Branding platform - becomes a tool to avoid under-performance and simultaneously improve Sales, Internal Culture, Management modeling, and Strategic Speed.

Without this info, sorry but…you’ll be losing money and efficiency EVERY DAY!!

Do you realize people have such a limited attention span that the most likely outcome of an interaction is they’ll absorb exactly nothing about you? It’s a scientific and human reality, in fact, so you can’t ignore this basic circumstance of the marketplace.

But this is why the Verbal Branding 5-second rule exists. You MUST tell your audience - whether in the spoken word or even in writing - something that holds differentiation value IMMEDIATELY! If not, you lose them…IMMEDIATELY!

The bad news is, you have to figure out exactly what to tell people in this space of time; the good news is, if you can figure it out, almost no one else in your competitive space is also able to do it, so you’ll separate yourself from the competition in a positive, brand oriented way.

Never mind all the blather when you speak and write, really. It’s not doing you any good at all, and is in fact hurting your ability to grow. Start with the 5-second rule for your brand positioning, and then go from there with the rest of your story.

Inherently, an elevator pitch does nothing more than attempt to DESCRIBE your company, products, or services in the most interesting and effective way. Branding should reflect how you POSITION and differentiate in the market.

So, the short version is, an elevator pitch describes you, and a brand (should) differentiate you. The latter is a superior message in every way. (And don’t let anyone tell you, “If the elevator pitch is done correctly, it will do this too!” Trust me, they are wrong: the very idea of trying to differentiate and position using a 30-second technique - by virtue of conversational dynamics alone - is doomed to failure.

No no no…you’re job is to develop the ideas that differentiate you from the competition. That’s what people and target audiences need to be told, whether through the spoken word, or for that matter any electronic or traditional channels as well.

When you think you need an elevator pitch, it means you aren’t identifying how your audience absorbs and remembers information. A correctly designed brand addresses these dynamics directly. In reality, people absorb and remember almost nothing. Therefore, your elevator pitch structure is literally at odds with how a humans brain works.

This is what to do: go into every interaction KNOWING those you speak with, or communicate with in any way, are only capable of absorbing and remembering possibly a think or two. What do you need that thing or two to be? It’s simple really; how you are differentiated (and presumably better) than the competition.

Branding allows you to communicate whatever that message is in one or two SIMPLE concepts, and extremely rapidly…certainly in much much less than 30 seconds.

There’s actually no room in the real world of doing business for a descriptive, 30-second mind dump, which hurts your ability to sell and communicate immeasurably.

Here’s why I attempted and am glad to have succeeded in having Alltop include my blog:

My Verbal Branding philosophies appear to be unique in the world market, so without it even Alltop’s site is incomplete. Both a spoken application for brand positioning and a new “business simplicity platform” are non-negotiable MUST HAVE business elements everyone should understand and apply. Yes, everyone!

Don’t believe me? Well, please judge for yourself as I continue talking about and explaining this thing called Verbal Branding, which has helped people and companies, from small to Fortune 200.

The goal of Verbal Branding? To simultaneously improve business simplicity and the total combined productivity of (at minimum) Sales, business culture, all management processes, and strategic speed.

Whether you realize it or not, without a Verbal Branding platform at your disposal, you are losing money and operational efficiency EVERY SINGLE DAY. (See you over at Alltop.)